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Are you passionated?

Hola Grammar Nazis,
Yes, I know passionated isn’t a word.Now with a heavy heart and an unsatisfied ego… Read on!

So I do this column for Student Story every Sunday, where I write about students who have done something extraordinary in school or college. This week I had an opportunity of meeting a young lad from Bihar, who is doing some amazing work with gesture detection applications for android phones.(Story) Somewhere during the conversation with the Yourstory team, he used the word passionated. Shradha, our founder corrected him, and I watched as he tried to internalize the word, lip syncing to commit it to memory. Later the same day, I was talking to him about his work, getting to know more about his projects, and somewhere in the conversation he used the word passionate. Exactly as he had heard one hour ago! Now it was a pretty normal word, but his willingness to learn and accept new things so enthusiastically was what truly amazed me.

I have always loved such people. Maybe I have a soft corner for them since my mother comes from similar backgrounds. At the age of 10, she came to Mapusa to pursue high secondary schooling. Having spent her entire life in Betul( a fishing village in rural Goa) learning in a Marathi medium school, she entered this English medium school, with a vocabulary of 20 words! How she managed to survive even a day in school, I have no idea. But she did. Armed with a dictionary and a will to learn, she completed 5th. By the time completed her sixth grade, she was not only somewhere at the top of her class, but was also doing extremely well in extra curriculars. That small clueless girl from that remote village, went on to do her Post graduation in Philosophy, from the best college in Goa.

Now the reason why this blog post came up is that, very often we find ourselves in situations where things don’t go our way. A hundred things stand between you and that thing of your dreams. Trying to block your path with all their might. Now you can look at them, in fear, and recede to one corner of the room and spend the rest of your life there. Or you could confront them. Learn what needs to be learnt, do what needs to be done. And as the world watches you, a tiny little creature, marching against everything in the world, with an open heart and a will to win, it will align itself, to see you through. As long as that passion and will prevail, there will be hope. There will be more Redbuses, more Nayi Dishas, and more Gharpays and in the legend’s words, the WORLD WILL BE BUILT by people no smarter than you and me, because they had the will and grit to see their dream through…